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Article: Chatterton, P orcid.org/0000-0001-9281-2230 and Pusey, A (2020) Beyond capitalist enclosure, commodification and alienation: Postcapitalist praxis as commons, social production and useful doing. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (1). pp. 27-48. ISSN 0309-1325 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518821173
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[email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Beyond capitalist enclosure, commodification and alienation. Postcapitalist praxis as commons, social production and useful doing.
Paul Chatterton, School of Geography, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT. UK. [email protected]
Andre Pusey, School of the Built Environment mmand Engineering, Leeds Beckett University, LS2
8AG. UK. [email protected]
Introduction
In recent years we have been impressed by the growing range of work in geography that continues to build nuanced and complex understandings of the sho condition.
A whole range of issues have received scholarly attention including: land, labour and migrant struggles (Davies and Isakjee, 2015; Harrison and Lloyd, 2012; Mackenzie et al., 2003; Ahmed, 2012;
Jenkins, 2014; Correia, 2008; Lewis et al., 2015); climate activism, anti-globalisation and radical protest movements (Montagna, 2006; Chatterton, 2010; Lopez, 2013; Wainwright and Kim, 2003;
Lessard-Lachance and Norcliffe, 2013; Routledge 2015; Pusey et al., 2012; Russell, 2014; Sundberg,
2007; Halvorsen, 2015; Nordås and Gleditsch, 2007); and, anti-gentrification struggles especially
W “ H N W .
At the same time, geographers continue to propose a range of progressive alternatives to articulate a more equal and sustainable world in diverse areas including community and popular education
(Motta, 2013; Evans et al., 2007; mrs kinpaisby, 2008; Noterman and Pusey, 2012; Pusey, 2017); alternative and community economies (Gibson-Graham and Cameron, 2013; North and Huber, 2004;
North, 2014; Cornwell, 2012; Taylor, 2014); food justice and urban agriculture (Ghose and
Pettygrove, 2014; Tornaghi, 2014; Heynen, 2010; Crossan et al., 2016); commons and radical democracy (Springer, 2011; Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015); and, low impact housing (Jarvis, 2011;
Thompson, 2015).
1 This paper is focussed on the broader agenda for change and analytical insights that can be discerned from this combination. We contend that it takes the form of a novel agenda for postcapitalist geographical enquiry and praxis which combines critique of the current capitalist system and propositions of alternatives beyond it. We take our cue from the formative work of
Gibson-Graham (2006) who first elaborated on the term postcapitalism as a way of exploring the diverse ways that postcapitalist subjects, economies, and communities can be fostered beyond capitalism. Our aim in this paper is twofold. First, we have a normative intention to further raise the profile of what postcapitalist analysis might mean for geography and geographers at a time when
(Dinerstein, 2014) that are possible beyond our deeply unequal, crisis-laden and often despondent present (Castree, 2010; Derickson et al., 2015). Second, we want to further understand the complexities of the uses of postcapitalism by reflecting on different strands of thinking and how they relate to various terrains of capitalist transformation.
From the outset, there are some significant caveats. Capitalism is a limited and shorthand analytical device that only partly explains our unequal world alongside a range of others, including patriarchy, hierarchy and racism. Moreover, capitalism and postcapitalism are not absolute and mutually exclusive conditions. They are dynamic and shifting tendencies, understood as much in relation to each other as separate entities. Drawing on the work of John Holloway (2010), we see postcapitalism as a set of activities and ideas that have multiple and interconnecting characteristics simultaneously in, against and beyond the present condition. There is an aspect of not having a choice but to continue life despite capitalism, and simply deal with its exploitation and alienation. At the same time, there are always opportunities for opposing capitalism, defining oneself against the status quo and taking whatever tactical opportunities, scholarly or otherwise, present themselves to slow and replace it. Finally, there is an aspect of living beyond capitalism, drawing on prefigurative action to enact future possibilities in the present (Springer, 2014).
2 Finally, postcapitalism is not a roadmap for a utopian future. There are scenarios beyond capitalism where the social fabric degrades and global society spirals out of control through, for example, widespread war, disease, ecosystem collapse, isolationism and repressive social control. While those futures could unfold, and indeed are unfolding in certain parts of the world, that is not the line of enquiry here. Instead, this paper focuses on a critical exploration of the various conditions that can generate transformative social futures that significantly depart from the material and discursive content of the capitalist present.
The paper begins by contextualising postcapitalism within three terrains of transformation (Wright,
2010) in which we see the dynamic interplay of the crisis tendencies of contemporary capitalism
(Panitch and Gindin, 2011) around enclosure, commodification and alienation, with a parallel set of postcapitalist tendencies around the common, social production and useful doing. The paper then critically interrogates three bodies of work which interrogate postcapitalism and point to a heterogeneous range of routes beyond capitalist economies and social relations: the feminist- oriented, neo-Marxist perspective employed by the Community Economies Collective and exemplified within the work of JK Gibson-Graham; the post-work perspective which seeks to accelerate the processes of technological evolution and speed up and make society more complex on the basis that the only way out of capitalism is through it; and finally autonomous, Open Marxist and anarchist influenced approaches to social-reproduction, which privilege politically autonomous ways of reproducing ourselves and our communities (Bonefeld et al, 1995; Clough and Blumberg,
2012). We then reflect on platform cooperatives as an example of postcapitalism in practice. We conclude by briefly exploring the social and spatial landscape of postcapitalism. There is an emergent future agenda for postcapitalism that can be usefully deployed within the discipline through, for example, creating a relational and knowledge common, focusing on the socially useful aspects of academic production, and creating opportunities for useful doing in our daily work.
Capitalism and postcapitalism: three terrains of transformation
3 Our discussion of postcapitalism requires some kind of positioning in relation to capitalism. We take our definitional starting point from the recent work of Erik Olin Wright (2010) who reminds us of the need to clarify and develop the contemporary case against capitalism. In summary this involves the following: that capitalist class relations generate unnecessary human suffering, especially through exploitation and competition, and while it creates conditions to live flourishing lives it blocks the extension of these conditions more generally; it limits principles of democratic political equality and individual freedom through the unequal distribution of private property and wealth generation and is incompatible with an equality of opportunity, especially as it imposes unchosen burdens on others; it has inbuilt inefficiencies especially in the deficiency of public goods, the commodification and over-consumption of natural resources, the creation of negative externalities, tendencies towards monopolies and the costs of social inequality; and, it is based on negative social and environmental consequences of the bias towards consumerism and the erosion of broadly held values such as safety, community and spirituality, in contrast to the promotion of militarism, privatisation and competition.
While it is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth stressing that there has been a long-standing commitment to critically exploring capitalism within the discipline of geography. This work has covered diverse areas including, but certainly not limited to, militarism, developmentalism, imperialism, dispossession, intersecting with a range of critical perspectives including patriarchy, racism and feminist theorising (Blaut, 1975; ; Hart, 2010; McDowell, 1986; Glassman, 2006; Gibson-
Graham, 2006) as well as and uneven geographical impacts (Wills, 2000; Harvey, 2006) and its entanglements with neoliberalisation (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Birch and Siemiatycki 2015).
Rather than elaborating on these now established critiques, what we do here is highlight three terrains of transformation in which there is a dynamic interplay and tension between the crisis-laden characteristics of capitalism and postcapitalism. Indeed, we are dealing with partial and relational
4 social forms that are continually contested. Since its very emergence, there has been resistance to capitalism and a desire to transcend, exceed or simply limit its extent and impact. Capitalism and its alternatives, therefore, have a shared history, and indeed capitalism has always had to contend with social forms of commoning that predate it and are primary to human life (Linebaugh, 2014). Critically focusing on this dynamic interplay into the present day across three terrains offers the potential for further analytical and practical insights into the future potentials and limits of postcapitalism. What we want to capture are the inter-connected ways in which postcapitalism operates as a means of organising social relations and production, the creation of value, as well as the ownership and management of land and assets.
Enclosure and commons
First, we point to the dynamic between capitalist enclosure and postcapitalist commons. The process of enclosure refers to a particular spatiality in the longue durée of the capitalist mode of production, and while it predates capitalism it acquires a structural significance through it (Sevilla-Buitrago,
2015). It highlights the ruptural and violent tendencies within capitalism, of forced labour, dispossession, social dislocation, slavery and the factory system. It is a broad phenomenon as it intervenes in the spheres of production, social reproduction, consumption and subjectification
(ibid.). The processes of capitalist enclosure have been extensively discussed, both historically in terms of the enclosure of common land (Federici, 2004; Hill, 1996; Linebaugh, 2014), as a series of deeply disruptive historical events that facilitated the emergence of early capitalism (Neeson, 1996), and more recently in terms of, for example, public space, seed patents, knowledge and housing
(Bollier, 2002; Federici, 2009; Hodkinson, 2012; Midnight Notes Collective, 1990). Geographers have also contributed to discussion of enclosure (Jeffrey, 2012 et al; Sevilla- Buitrago, 2015) focusing on what is termed accumulation by dispossession and the continuation of violent enclosure into the present (Glassman, 2006; Prudham, 2007).
5 Processes of primitive accumulation and enclosure are central not only to the origins of capitalism but to its ongoing development (Bonefeld, 1988; 2001). These processes of enclosure are central to our separation from means of self-reproduction and ensure we sell our labour power on the market
(De Angelis, 2017). Contemporary struggles are often centred on processes of enclosure. For example, contemporary contestation has focussed on the increasing marketization of universities
(Amsler, 2011; Myers, 2017; Radice, 2013; Sealey-Huggins and Pusey, 2013), the destruction of the
(Seel, Paterson and Doherty, 2002) and urban enclosures in the form of gentrification and dispossession (Gillespie, 2016; Hodkinson, 2012;
Stavrides, 2014 M N
These unjust and often violent processes of enclosure also coexist alongside tendencies towards creating postcapitalist commons. The common has become an important tool for exploring alternative forms of social wealth and social production. A broad literature has emerged concerning the theoretical and practical utilization of the common as a form of social (re)production and collective property as well as social organization which refuses individualised notions of property and ownership and celebrates the co-ownership, co-production and co-management of social goods and spaces (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; De Angelis, 2017; Federici, 2012). Discussion of the common within the discipline of geography has become increasingly commonplace which has led to nuanced understandings and applications (Blomley, 2007; Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015; Eizenberg,
2012; Jeffrey, McFarlane and Vasudevan, 2012; Noterman, 2016). In particular, there has been increasing discussion of the importance of the urban common (Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011) in both resisting urban enclosure (Hodkinson, 2012) and providing spaces to experiment with alternative
(postcapitalist) social forms (Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healey, 2016).
Increasing attention is being paid to the concept of the common as a means of exploring non- capitalist forms of self-management, collective property ownership and the co-production of social goods and spaces. The common is not only as a series of goods and spaces that require defending
6 from capitalist enclosures and commodification, but also a means to struggle against capitalism, create postcapitalist subjectivities and forms of value produced and held in common (Caffentzis,
2010; Hardt, 2010; Vieta, 2016). Indeed, De Angelis (2017) stresses that the common is a field of power relations that can explode the limits of daily life under capitalism. Commoning, therefore, is a social process. Indeed, Cameron and Healy (2016) view the practice of commoning as part of a postcapitalist politics that has the potential to uncover commoning-communities that are not merely reactive to capital and indeed include non-human agency. From this perspective, the agents of change are not only the working class, social movements, governments or human beings, for example, but instead powerful assemblages that may include all these elements.
Commodification and socially useful production
The second dynamic we highlight entails capitalist processes of commodification alongside impulses to generate more socially useful forms of collective production. Capitalism is a social relation predicated on the production of commodities and the emergence and organisation of a market society around this relationship. This is outlined most clearly in chapter One of Capital in which Marx
(1990) explains the nature of value creation in capitalist societies. Once forms of social reproduction have been brought under capitalist control, we become incorporated in this circuit of value creation through the production and consumption of commodities.
The commodity form is at the centre of our social existence, then, not only in the form of the consumer society it gives birth to and thrives off, but as the organising principle of our lives. The commodification of increasing arenas of life is the intensified subsumption of our existence to the organising principles of capital. Castree (2003) has presented one of the most useful summaries of the key aspects of commodification, including privatisation, alienation, individuation, abstraction, valuation, and displacement. These characteristics of commodification have spread rapidly and penetrated more and more aspects of contemporary life, encompassing for example public service provision and stocks of natural assets including air, water and forests. In sum, the continual search
7 existence and indeed expansion.
Commodification has penetrated to such an extent that its broader negative social effects are now undermining the ability of market societies to function. For example, it limits the purpose of production to profit maximisation, introduces value creation across a range of mundane social activities, distorts relations between people especially in terms of equal gender relations, introduces precarious work and reduces non monetised gift and barter exchange (Nelson and Timmerman,
2011). Above all, the increased commodification of natural entities and their conversion to natural capital is creating a number of potential ecological breaking points not least their further enclosure and exchange on the market (Raworth, 2017).
In this context, there is growing interest in how to create novel parallel social forms of production and reproduction that create non-commodified forms of social goods. The key is that these are based on actual material needs and desires that underpin human flourishing rather than the reproduction of profit and value. There is a broad range of attempts to provide alternatives to capitalist production ranging across antiglobalisation and anticorporate activism, deep green and antigrowth economics, eco-socialist, ecofeminist and anticapitalist organising (Wall, 2015). Eroding the structural conditions that underpin commodification and profit maximisation necessarily requires new forms of social organisation of production and alternative conceptions and practical forms of the economy.
There are glimpses of these kinds of approaches which litera G -
Graham et al, 2013) and develop socially useful production. The broader social and solidarity economy (SSE) is a breeding ground, taming the excesses of market economies and privileging use or experiential forms of value over exchange value (North and Scott Cato, 2018). Socially useful forms of production that emerge from this include reciprocity, barter markets, cooperative organisational forms as well as complementary currencies, household and community based activities (North
8 2014). Wholescale alternative plans such as Parecon (Albert, 2004) have also been devised as a way of implementing life beyond capitalism. Moreover, researchers from the Centre for Research on
Socio-Cultural Change in the UK use the term foundational economy to point to the mundane yet vital areas of the social - being (Bowman et al., 2014). The broader community wealth building movement sits within this, as attempts to alter the structural conditions of the economy by ensuring value circulates locally (Dubb,
2016). The key issue for this terrain is the extent to which value and commodity forms are not just localised but also soc ure and meaning of the commons (Neary, 2016: 369).
Alienation and doing
This brings us to the third terrain of transformation. The dominance of the production of exchange value in capitalist society is predicated on social F M
C F involves a process of alienation, where workers sell their labour power and produce commodities for others and subsequently become separated from the outcomes of their endeavours. We are divorced from the results of the activity that make up the majority of our everyday lives. Activity that we engage in buys back the means of our own social reproduction in search of the extras that might enable us to live a good life, or at least the means of recovering from the exhaustion, mundanity and isolation of our everyday existence.
This alienation is ever intensified as capitalist social relations spread out from the traditional sites of production, such as the factory, and are exported across society more broadly, something
M T 6). As this develops further we are increasingly reduced to rational economic subjects and neoliberal subjectivity becomes the dominant form of relating to one another (Bondi, 2005). This alienation is underpinned by processes of individualisation and categorisation, whereby social categories, identities and classes are used to
9 separate, control and exploit populations. The emancipation of ourselves from this alienation, from work, is not an individual liberation, but a collective and universal emancipation through the destruction of the social relations of commodity production and their ability to organise life.
What counters this tendency towards alienation is socially useful doing. Principally, we draw upon
H (2010) purposeful concrete activity, as opposed to abstract labour, what William Morris called useful work as opposed to useless toil. Abstract labour is one part of the dual nature of labour as it is organised under capitalism, with concrete labour producing use value and abstract labour producing exchange
D H that is potentially self- that does not fit into a wor H
H T I
capitalism] is the revolt of doing agains H
The pivot, the central fulcrum, in all of this is our doing: human creation. One form of doing,
labour, creates capital, the basis of the society that is destroying us. Another form of doing,
what we call simply 'doing', pushes against the creation of capital and towards the creation
of a different society (Holloway, 2010: 85).
B H which are constitutive of these cracks with the refusal of abstract labour and value, and therefore
B
H s the spaces of negation and creation that form these cracks are well situated to refuse the means of our subjugation. Through social or useful doing, people can counter alienating categorisation and specialisation, and self-explore social roles and identities beyond those narrowly attributed through alienated work. As Marx suggests in
10 the German Ideology, in a postcapitalist society (s)he could afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever
Contemporary debates on postcapitalist futures
A growing number of writers, commentators and activists postcapitalism explore a heterogeneous range of alternatives to capitalist economies and work. In this section, we specifically identify three tendencies in contemporary social praxis (community economies, post- work, and autonomous politics) as they offer discrete, overlapping, and sometimes competing, insights into postcapitalism. In diverse ways, they all point to the three terrains of transformation explored earlier. They offer analytical insights on the nature and extent of enclosure, commodification and alienation; commentary on the status and importance of the common, community production and socially useful doing; the role of technology and its impact on the future of work; and the evolving relations between the state, social movements and civil society. We explore these three tendencies in turn below.
First, the community economies perspective is a loose term to refer to a set of critical writings that have developed a sustained critique of the capitalist economy and importantly what subjectivities, social practices and spatialities underpin the alternatives that coexist alongside it. One of the main advocates is a constellation of researchers in the Community Economies Collective. Taking the lead from the foundational feminist-oriented, neo-Marxist work of JK Gibson-Graham, in their joint work and that with others, they have laid out a detailed understanding of the term postcapitalism within geography (Gibson-Graham 2006; Cameron and Gibson, 2005; Gibson-Graham et al., 2013). One of the central contributions of this approach is their critique of political-economy for its
the capitalist economy as a dominating force (Gibson-Graham, 1996).
11 Further, they suggest that the capitalist economy is only one of a diverse array of economies that co-exist. This diversity is obscured when capitalism is framed as the dominant form of economy by capitalocentric discourse.
The community economies approach has provided detailed analysis of what it means to envision, negotiate, build and enact life beyond capitalism through a postcapitalist subject that is involved in
G -Graham, 2006: xxvii). It has produced research that provides multiple examples that counter the neoliberal narrative that there are no alternatives (Gibson-
Graham , 2005; Gibson-Graham, and Roelvink, 2010; Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2011; Gibson-
Graham, Cameron, and Healy, 2013).
One particular focus is on reimagining. For example, Healey (2015: 347) suggests that what stands in the way of postcapitalism is a capitalist imaginary that imparts order to our economy. This approach has done a good deal to break down capitalocentric imaginary and its discourse, providing examples of other economic practices which counters powerful hegemonic capitalist imaginaries with new postcapitalist ones. This is the terrain of speculation, hope and advocacy (Dinnerstein, 2014) which offers space to reimagine and dream. Postcapitalism is as much about posing questions, or indeed recognising there are questions to be posed, as much as stating answers.
This community economies perspective foregrounds resubjectivisation and meso-level organisations as routes to challenging capitalism, especially through common and community owned entities such as cooperatives, land trusts and community development organisations. Through such activities, subjectivities can be articulated that certainly point away from commodified and alienated abstract capital-centric activities (Healy, 2015). However, analytical gaps remain in terms of the extent to which these can be scaled and resubjectivisation can fundamentally challenge abstract labour and the creation of capitalist value (Dean, 2012). In particular, many forms of subjectivisation may stop short and sediment into social enterprise personas, even with a radical slant. The extent to which such postcapitalist subjects can be, or indeed need to be, part of broader politicised movements
12 rather than free floating and empowered change agents requires further exploration. Without a more favourable macro-level environment, such meso-level postcapitalist innovations can find it difficult to thrive. In particular, the role of the state looms large (Cumbers, 2015; Routledge et al.,
2018), and the broader project of radical municipalisation (Plan C & Russell, 2017) needs clarifying in terms of facilitating and resourcing alternative economies.
The second area of postcapitalist debate is the post-work perspective (Pitts and Dinnerstein, 2017), which at a general level explores the basis for abolishing work through automation and the provision of measures such as the universal basic income. There is a long tradition of the critique of work, from L G D “
A G B B (1985) call
e recent critiques such as Weeks D G
(2018) discussion of the phenomenon of B .
This post-work perspective has close overlaps with the so-called accelerationist approach, a term coined by its detractors (Noys, 2010) but since then has been more widely embraced (Williams and
Srnicek, 2013). Noys (2014) traces accelerationism back to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, through to the reactionary accelerationism of Nick Land in the 1990s and to the publication of the accelerationist manifesto in 2013. Accelerationists want to accelerate the processes of technological evolution, speeding up and making society more complex. In the
Accelerationist Manifesto, which introduced accelerationism to a wider audience, Williams and
Srnicek (2013) put it like this:
Accelerationism is a political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to
capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its
own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive
tendencies.
13 This approach appears at ease with modernity, technology and the state as a way of overcoming the limits of capitalism. In fact, a more likely way out of capitalism could be through it. It argues for the broader enlightenment project to be completed, rather than abandoned. From this perspective technology is being limited by capitalism and it needs repurposing to more socially just and collective ends.
Similarly, Paul Mason (2015) has been one of the most prominent advocates to point towards new transitional practices that are emerging through what he calls modular and micro project design, where peer-to-peer networks implement and manage an expanding postcapitalist global common through collaborative production and a sharing economy. Taking this further, Srnicek and Williams
(2015) focus on the progressive opportunities that new forms of technology provide, including full automation and an end to work alongside the adoption of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). In this work, they T define folk politics as:
a constellation of ideas and intuitions within the contemporary left that informs common-
sense ways of organising, acting and thinking politics. It is a set of assumptions that
threatens to debilitate the left, rendering it unable to scale up, create lasting change or
expand beyond particular interests (2015; 9).
Srnicek and W movements, focusing in particular on the commitment to horizontalism, including consensus decision making, and a perceived focus on localism as a privileged scale of political activity. For
Srnicek and Williams:
T L
localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must
become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction,
complexity, globality, and technology (2015: 10).
14 In place of folk politics Srnicek and Williams argue for T argue that, instead of rejecting hegemonic politics as some left thinkers have suggested (Day, 2005), we need to Routledge et al., 2018).
Post-work has an expanded vision of the common at the national or even international level. In contrast to community economy approaches, such commons are more technologically reliant and governed by larger coalitions of state and civil society actors. Equally socially useful production is facilitated through automation with the aim of creating work free and leisured social activity, supplemented through a Universal Basic Income. However, the extent to which having more free time through automation actually challenges the underlying structure of society around commodification and alienated work is highly contested.
For example, QQ have argued that:
Postcapitalism, or more accurately radical Keynesianism appears not as the transition stage
ate-capitalist economy.
In which case, postcapitalism is nothing more than a theory of social reform and hence at
complete odds with the goals of communism (QQ, 2018).
Similarly, the Internationalist Communist Tendency (2018, np) have suggested that accelerationism could be a call for a benevolent class of technocrats who can gradually reform capitalism for the masses.
They continue by suggesting that Srnicek and Williams new populist metanarrative and infiltrating left wing parties without the working class ever taking power, and without the abolition (ibid., np). The post-work, postcapitalist position is, then, underpinned by a larger macro political-economy strategy around large-scale class realignments and efforts to respond to ecological and social crises. Its aim is not to
15 stop automation, but commonise its ownership through the state. This is a deeply contradictory position where the state gains more power uncritically. However, as the Internationalist Communist
Tendency (2018) further point out, forms of organisation are not neutral. Political parties, states, trade unions and networks are not so malleable as to be able to serve any and all purposes.
Therefore, the idea that the state can be captured through a revitalised and radicalised party political system (be it Corbyn in the UK or Saunders in the USA) in order to abolish work and implement is highly contestable, even if deemed desirable.
Pitts and D -human pro-machine
initiatives that attempt to build new forms of social reproduction from below. While Pitts and
Dinerstein (2017) and Dinerstein, Pitts and Taylor (2016) indicate that the British Labour Party is seriously considering these ideas, they suggest that postcapitalist advocacy for a UBI income and full
for several reasons. Firstly, reliance on UBI to create a post-work world does not equate with a meaningful postcapitalism, because the negative effects of capitalism are not limited to work, but also to our subordination to money and commodities. They
D P and Taylor, 2016). Secondly, they argue that technology is not neutral, and the fully automated post-work society envisioned by proponents of this version of postcapitalism does not negate the commodity form, capitalist social relations, nor current levels of unsustainable consumption and their associated environmental effects. As D P
(2016) point out, I -
(Bastani, 2018), Dinerstein, Pitts and Taylor (2016) argue for a utopia of the common in order to create new forms of social reproduction in the Social and
Solidarity Economy that do not rely on us living under the domination of money, the state and value.
16 A set of parallel issues emerge from post-work, especially in terms of the implications of its focus with macro-level outcomes and change agents that are constituted through the formal state and enabled by technologized platforms and artefacts. In terms of the common, protocols and norms of governance are mediated through the sphere of an empowered and emboldened nation-state which privileges a certain spatial imaginary and political actors. While there is a progressive recasting of production to more socially useful ends, it is bound up with larger, more centrally orchestrated and technologically enabled activities. And while labour may become less abstract, social doing is re- engineered within a broader plan for how humans spend their time. These kinds of tensions are played out in political movements such as Syriza who have had to take difficult decisions, often against the demands of their supporters and own members, to stay in power (Ovenden, 2015).
The third postcapitalist strand focuses on autonomous social forms and practices and their potential to build methodologies of organisation and social (re)production that challenge capitalism.
Specifically, work here focuses on initiatives and struggles that are critical of the nature of the state and any potential liberatory power that it might contain. Analytical attention is given to the power of the collective and networked organising between empowered and radicalised social movements and civil society actors. Hence, there is a focus on exploring the potential of politically autonomous forms of social reproduction based on self-managing assets and resources (Holloway, 2010; Cleaver, 2000).
In geography, this was elaborated by the Autonomous Geographies Collective who explored the basis for unlocking change beyond the capitalist status quo (Chatterton et al., 2010; Clough and
Blumberg, 2012). This approach brings together analytical insights from anarchism, autonomism, feminism, ecologism and Open Marxism as well as Italian Operaismo and post-operaismo.
This autonomous approach has a number of key features. Analytical attention is paid to the politics and practices of social reproduction and social movements in terms of the ways in which individuals within this system reproduce themselves materially and socially (Dalla Costa and James 1973;
Federici, 2012). There is also attention given to the practices and potentials of autonomy, self-
17 management and self-valorisation (Cleaver, 1992). Autonomy, originating from the Greek autos- nomos, meaning self-legislation, capacity to make choices in freedom with the ability of an individual to collectively and equally
institutions (Castoriadis, 1991).
Theoretical work on autonomy and social reproduction emerged in the context of Italian autonomism and the autonomous Marxism tradition (Cleaver, 2000). Groups such as Autonomia
O W A P O W P L C T “ uggle
Continues) extended the struggle from the factory to the wider city, focusing on community, feminist and working class struggles, helping to spark countless strikes, factory occupations, sabotages and squats (Lotinger and Marazzi, 1980). The movement of 1977 was the apogee of Italian autonomy, promoting experiments in class confrontation such as squatting, looting and pirate radio, and highlighting the unpaid social reproductive work of women within the home in ways that benefit capital (Federici, 1975;).
This autonomous tradition represents what is often regarded as interstitial or prefigurative strategies. As such, this perspective points towards the forms of postcapitalist social reproduction that are being developed in the gaps that exist in capitalism, whilst struggling against it in order to literally prefigure and make real alternatives beyond it. They are particularly effective at fast prototyping of micro-scale commons through for example, community gardens, radical social centres, temporary encampments, or other disruptive tactical interventions such as subvertising, road blocks, and flash mobbing (Feigenbaum et al, 2013; Montagna, 2006). During these moments, there is rapid community building and experimenting with new abilities and aptitudes for socially useful forms of doing and production based on intensely deliberative democratic and consensual forms of decision making and relations of care and compassion.
Autonomist postcapitalist politics have an emerging spatial sensibility around self-governing micro commons, which are often non-contiguous but highly networked, especially through transnational
18 activists (Featherstone, 2003). It manifests in practices such as social centres, squatting and emotional activism, as well as democratic and communicative practices such as Non Violent
Communication and consensus decision making (Graeber, 2013; Katsiaficas, 1997; Pusey, 2010;
Vasudevan, 2017). Moreover, the Occupy and squares movement has provided further credence to the power of networked assemblies that experiment with novel forms of decentralised social power
(Halvorsen, 2012; Pickerill et al, 2016; Kaika and Karaliotas, 2014). This spatial politics provides a significant analytical departure from the post-work approach and typifies the critique levelled by accelerationists of a naïve and insular folk politics.
What needs more exploration is the relationship between state and meso-level institutional formations and experimental autonomous activity. Does the power of innovations in the latter, dissipate without the protection of the former? In the context of less favourable macro-level state environments, are these experiments thwarted through, for example, police infiltration, hostile media coverage and direct repression? (Mitchell and Heynen, 2009). Perhaps the real power of these more fleeting autonomous experiments rests not in their ability to lay down longer term options, but in acting as temporary, and ongoing, seedbeds for innovation, experimentation and learning for how postcapitalist futures may unfold. They may be disruptive tactics and networks across spatially dispersed territories. These kinds of temporary innovation flourish in periods of greater alignment and support from meso-level structures especially trade unions, civil society organisations, the media and a radicalised municipal culture.
Postcapitalist praxis
As the terrains of capitalist enclosure, commodification and alienation combine and expand along with the socio-environmental crises of the Anthropocene (Castree, 2015; Derickson and MacKinnon,
2015), or perhaps more accurately the capitalocene (Harroway, 2016), so do those of postcapitalism.
But what actual contemporary social practices resonate with postcapitalist terrains of commoning, socially useful production and doing, as well as the thematics of community economies, post-work
19 and autonomous organising? While there are many fragments or glimpses of postcapitalism in practice, there are no widespread manifestations across particular territories or sectors. Rather, there is a patchwork of partial, emergent and multi-faceted tendencies, representing a complex intersection of intents that combine efforts to work within, beyond and against the capitalist present
(Holloway, 2009). These tendencies can be found across a range of areas of contemporary social and economic practices through attempts to embed de-growth and social/solidarity economies which respond to the consequences of E -supporting systems on which we fundamentally depend and the perpetuation of inequality and human suffering. Examples include, but are not limited to, civic energy, low impact housing, urban agriculture, community wealth building, socially just mobility, circular economies, restorative design practices and citizen empowerment.
For the purposes of this paper, we have chosen the emerging area of platform cooperatives as an example of postcapitalist praxis, as it offers a range of analytical insights into our three terrains of postcapitalism. Platform cooperativism is of contemporary interest as it brings together long standing commitments to community democracy and worker self-management, unionisation, common ownership, ethical values, wealth sharing and social value creation within the rapidly growing digital and creative economy. Employment in the digital economy in the UK, for example, is growing at twice the rate of the overall economy. The basic rationale of platform cooperatives is that they have the potential to ensure a more equitable and worker controlled version of the corporate controlled digitally economy by circulating financial and social value among participants.
Although, as Marx (1990) identified, cooperation is a key feature of capitalism, cooperatives are a distinct form of organisation that was developed in response to capitalist work. For Neary (2017, np)
understood as a practical response to the antagonistic relationship between
M Cooperatives offered an opportunity to practice radical forms of democracy and assert some control over the ownership of production and control over
20 work practices. Based on values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity, cooperatives have long acted as an example of an alternative model based on self- management.
The term platform cooperativism emerged through critical debates about the emergence and implications of digital labor and the so called collaborative and sharing economies and associated platforms such as Uber, TaskRabbit and Deliveroo (Scholz, 2016; Scholz and Schneider, 2016). The corporate controlled sharing economy has highlighted a whole raft of issues relevant to the broader critique of capitalism including precarious and alienated labour in the gig-economy, knowledge enclosure, anti-union activity, extraction and concentration of surplus value and social wealth, and the further penetration of commodification into previously uncommodified areas of life including household and community work and neighbourhood based sharing. Platform cooperatives aim to reclaim the essence of human sharing and collaboration and repurpose them to more common, ethical, less commodified, more socially useful and cooperative ends.
Numerous platform cooperatives have emerged including Fairmondo, a cooperative alternative to ebay and Amazon marketplace; Loomio, an open source software tool for collective decision- making; Stocksy, an artist owned cooperative that sells stock photography and shares profits with workers and artists; CoLab, a global worker owned data agency; and the Data Commons Cooperative which connects cooperatives so they can share data across the solidarity economy. One of the most illuminating is FairCoop an online platform that aims to share tools and skills between cooperatives in order to build a new global economic system based on cooperation, solidarity, and justice. It organises around local nodes who are remunerated through the FairCoin cryptocurrency. Platform cooperatives have gained broad interest including support from the P2P Foundation, an annual
OpenCoop conference, and the Platform Cooperativism Consortium hosted by the University of New
Y N “
21 This fast moving area of the digital economy offers critical insights into the kinds of terrains where postcapitalist futures will be played out, especially in terms of the progressive possibilities of the rapid acceleration of digital technologies and associated post-work scenarios. First, there is a clear commitment to building a digital infrastructure where there is broader ownership. Participants exchange open-source software, data and information for the benefit of platform participants, but also for broader common and social use value. The critical question remains the form and function of this digital common as it is built. It encompasses geographically diffuse networks of digital creative workers as well as place based attempts to create hubs that act as convergence spaces for hacktivists and social activists more generally. What needs more exploration is the potential to mobilise the digital common as a vehicle to erode and ultimate replace, rather than simply co-exist alongside, daily life under capitalism. Important issues of ownership and control remain unresolved, which stretches across small groupings of member-owned cooperatives, the interests of highly motivated social entrepreneurs and macro interest from progressive national governments tapping into the power of a larger scale cooperative common.
Second, there are limits to platform cooperatives if they are restricted to an online digital common.
The real potential is to combine digital with place-based community wealth building initiatives that seek to respond to widescale poverty, dereliction and capital withdrawal in particular localities. Of interest here is the Cleveland model, that emerged from Cleveland, USA to create large-scale employee-owned enterprises as alternative wealth-building and wealth-sharing entities where stakeholders come together to create local economic development, green job creation, and neighbourhood stabilization (Alperovitz, 2004). Similarly, the Catalan Integrated Cooperative has over 2,500 members participating in various autonomous initiatives such as housing, transport and healthcare as independent cooperatives. Members participate in education, a cooperative basic income platform, eco/collective stores, meetings and events and it has developed a physical hub
A “ in Barcelona. In its entirety, it has been
Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing
22 system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a postcapitalist mode of organization of social and ec Dafermos, 2017). This model coupled with an enabling infrastructure of platform cooperatives seems to offer fertile ground for meaningful postcapitalist experiments, especially around novel forms of community-based doing and common ownership of the economy that has the potential to scale beyond self-governing micro-local experiments.
Third, platform cooperatives aim to develop more ethical and less capital-centric forms of economic activity, especially those which embed non commodified and socially useful forms of production.
This is certainly evident across a range of areas including reskilling, open data platforms and knowledge sharing. What is evident across cooperative platforms is a desire to ethically trade socially useful commodities, increase market share at the expense of corporate providers, and capture and retain value for the benefit of worker-members. The broader and more significant challenge for the open, cooperative digital economy is whether this laudable spirit of ethics, collaboration can degrade the commodity form and the organisation of a market society that has emerged around this relationship (Scholz, 2016)
Finally, there is a clear desire to harness technology to make work less alienating and precarious, and specifically create greater job security and control amongst gig-workers. As we explored earlier, useful doing necessarily requires a more fundamental abolition and dissolution of work, not only through a cooperative reformulation but through its absolute negation. What requires further critical exploration, then, is the exact nature of the vision of work that emerges from cooperative platforms and the extent to which it represents o an everyday level. There are concerns that these kinds of ventures can be incubators for corporate buy-outs or demutualization where value is released for private financial gain. Nevertheless, current levels of activity suggest that platform cooperatives will continue to grow and consolidate into a productive set of social and working practices that represent viable alternatives to the corporate digital economy. What needs close scrutiny is how platform cooperatives combine disruptive tendencies alongside activities that use existing institutional resources and structures as well as
23 experiment interstitially and prefiguratively outside them. Close scrutiny will be needed to see how these tendencies continue to play out, and whether they become incorporated and subsumed into new logics of capital accumulation.
Conclusion
In this paper, our intention has been to explore the concept of postcapitalism to further an agenda for geographical enquiry and praxis. To do this we have outlined some of its contours across three terrains of transformation: creating commons in ways that resists enclosure but also experiment with novel postcapitalist subjectivities; developing socially useful production that can counter the penetration of commodification; and, forms of useful doing that can crack capitalism through the negation of precarious work and useless toil. We have also shown how the term is being mobilised with different inflections and intents through, for example debates on community economies, post- work and autonomous politics. None of these perspectives offers a privileged analytical understanding into the inner workings of postcapitalism. But they all offer productive insights. These include the need to recognise the copresence of noncapitalist economic forms, processes of post capitalist resubjectivisation especially through the creation of commons, the potential to harness and further radicalise the unfinished project of left modernity through reclaiming the state and advanced technology, and the power of self management and radical micro politics as breeding grounds for alternatives.
We contend that there is value in bringing these perspectives into constructive dialogue.
Postcapitalist practices that have a realistic chance of tackling the challenges ahead are likely to be an amalgamation of the tendencies we have identified. First, we must restress that to qualify as postcapitalist, practices need to somehow play out on the three terrains we identified: building the common, socially useful production and doing. Beyond this, they need to be alive to the power of micro level autonomous radical social action, meso level community and diverse economies and macro level interventions by the state and other large scale social actors. But they also need to see
24 the limitations of all these. There is a difficult path to walk that harnesses the power of radical micro experiments without falling into a naïve localism or romanticised folk politics, as well as engaging with the state and big tech without being captured by centralising and bureaucratic tendencies. We
W way formulation on strategic intention helpful to navigate these tensions. In all cases there will be a particular balance between the ruptural desire to break the system, symbiotic moves to work within existing institutions, and interstitial activities that break free and lay down prefigurative future markers. These tendencies will play out in different ways in particular geographical contexts. Moments of strategic convergence may accelerate change: social movements and political actors committed to ruptural practices, institutional actors symbiotically changing regime practices from within, and a constellation of disruptive interstitial experiments laying down clear markers for novel future pathways.
Our empirical example of platform cooperatives provided some lessons here. There is a clear desire to create a more humane and ethical digital economy as a direct challenge to the corporate digital world. What needs further exploration is the form and function of the common (both virtual and real) that emerge from this, the extent to which the forms of production that they facilitate undermine the accumulation of surplus value and the expansion of commodification, and their ability to create socially useful doing as opposed to precarious useless toil. Some aspects may fall into naïve localist folk politics and faith in self-governing micro-political experiments, and others into fetishism with technological solutions and the state form.
We want to finish on some reflections on the, as yet unclear and partially formed, social and spatial landscape of postcapitalism (see also Mason and Whitehead 2012). At a fundamental level, if the capitalist system generates deep social and spatial unevenness, then postcapitalism has to work towards the opposite. Postcapitalist social and spatial formations should inhibit the accumulation of surplus value, individualisation, commodification and enclosure, as well as build commons, socially useful production and doing. This spatial politics is complex and multi-layered. It is not likely to represent a blueprint for social change across a unified territory. There will be discrete and relatively
25 localised clusters of activity that are diffuse and non-contiguous and connect through what Katz
(2001) called counter topographical networks. Postcapitalist geographies, therefore, will not have a clear or singular scalar politics, especially those articulated through the nation-state (see Marston et al., 2005). It more likely reflects archipelagos of common experiments that layer together different spatial entities - networks, places and broader sectors be they civic energy, community finance anchors, low impact housing or digital cooperatives. There will also be hybrid platforms that provide a brokerage role across a range of services, skills and tools.
Recognising the potential of postcapitalism, then, requires a different spatial literacy one that is alive to diffuse and horizontal connections and capacities that are built up through peer to peer and collaborative networks that bring together experiments in commoning both on- and off-line. One of the key spatial challenges is in the relationship between the state and politicised meso-level initiatives within civil society. While there is a desire to create a very different state form that is participatory, enabling and deeply self-critical (Wainwright, 2018), the extent to which the state can become an effective vehicle to counter the excesses of capitalism, and hence become a strong ally of a more radicalise civil society, remains to be seen.
Hopefully, we have mapped out a future agenda for postcapitalist enquiry and praxis that can be further explored within the discipline of geography in many ways. First, we hope that this further ignites scholarly and research interest in postcapitalism. We want to see more conferences, research grants, workshops and teaching modules on the topic, not least to expose future students, policy makers and the public to these ideas and the critical challenges they emerge from (see also
Routledge and Derickson, 2015; Derickson and Routledge, 2015). Second, there are emerging questions that can shape the future of our discipline: what would an academic common look like, both in terms of knowledge and inter-personal relations; can we reclaim the elements of our jobs that represent useful doing rather than alienating work and useless toil; and, overall how can we ensure what we are doing as a discipline represents socially useful production that does not further commodify, privatise and extract surplus value? These are significant and challenging issues. But we
26 raise them in the hope of creating greater analytical and practical energy towards postcapitalist futures in our discipline, workplaces and society more broadly.
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